An unexpected act of support
Supporting designers through transitions
I’ll start by saying that I’m one of those design leaders who hasn’t come from a traditional design background. I began my career as an engineer designing telecommunications networks, which required a deep understanding of how technology and systems, people and organizations interact with one another. I started with a necessity to understand how complex systems work.
In 1994, having switched to working in digital, it wasn’t unusual to perform many roles, or to encounter people who lacked what we see today as formal, traditional design education. You see, much of it didn’t exist back then and people like me were brought in to teach it. As we encountered challenges, we learned and adapted along the way. As a result, not many of us ended up precisely where we started.
So why is this important?
After a long career in technology, digital, operations, program management, and design, having founded two design agencies, and worked with countless brands, I now spend most of my days consulting for small to global enterprise organizations about how to set-up, restructure or optimize digital product, research and design teams.
I spend a lot of time supporting leadership teams who are sometimes trying to deliver nearly impossible programs of change within and across their organizations. It’s at the nexus of consulting and leadership engagement that I encounter people who struggle with the transition from practitioner to manager to leader.
Though I’m not a formally trained coach, elements of coaching have crept into my practice over the last decade. I deal with people and organizations at points of transition, moments where they leave one thing behind to become something new or different. Transitions create anxiety, stress, play on fears people have, cause erratic behaviors, and heighten the complexity of the changes they are going through by creating an environment of instability.
I can understand those moments. Having been through a great many changes in my own life, transitions become barriers that you need to find a way to push through. They can involve engaging with people at different altitudes than you’re used to, taking on new responsibilities, learning new capabilities, or even moving away from doing things you are either comfortable with, or enjoy doing.
Transitions
Transitions can be scary. Working with designers who are on a path from practitioner to manager, to capability leader to organizational leader presents many different types of challenges, not least of which involve leaving the “doing” of design behind to leading it, and sometimes even having to diminish leading design to learning about how to incorporate design at an organizational level. The CDO who sits with their relevant peers is probably doing about as much deliverable design as the CTO is doing coding.
This change in the focus of a role can create anxiety for the designer who isn’t properly prepared to become a leader. It can cause imposter syndrome to an anxiety-ridden degree. But the thing is, you don’t have to make these transitions alone. There are people, like myself, who have walked alongside others who have taken this path. This is where consultancy often overlaps with coaching. Individuals who bring me in to help with heavy lifting around organizational change often find an unexpected degree of solace in having someone they can relate to, who understands the challenges of their role.
And this is the crux of the “designer to leader” problem for me. Moving up through the ranks can result in Designers feeling isolated, believing that sharing vulnerability around lack of experience will expose them as less capable leaders than their peers. Climbing the ladder for designers can cause frustration as they move further from the skills that made them good at what they do.
And as they move towards being business leaders where they need to learn new skills, new metalanguages, where their tools change from Figma to Excel, and their outputs change from design to building business cases, looking at operational cost savings, improving revenue, and feeding into shareholder reports, their frustrations and anxiety often increase.
The relationships you build
Making the transition from designer to leader a challenge, for sure. But there are many leaders in the design world who recognize this challenge and focus on helping people during these sometimes inevitable transitions in their careers. This is the part of my career that has been the most unplanned and at the same time the most surprising. It’s the privilege I feel in being a part of other people’s journeys that I find most rewarding.
It’s one thing to help a business through a change of operation. It’s another thing altogether to help another human being through a transition in their career. Maybe it isn’t the primary reason that my clients engage me — but it’s one of the main reasons that I have remained close to many of them for so long after the engagement is over.
For me, that has become the real highlight of my work over the last decade.
